Exploding plastic memorial

Thursday

Sep 11, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 11, 2008 at 10:59 PM

While neither Lou Reed nor John Cale will be on hand when the Wexner Center's ballyhooed Warhol installation Other Voices, Other Rooms opens this weekend, the Wex has arranged the next best thing. Robert Forster will play a set of Velvet Underground covers Saturday.

The ideal soundtrack for an Andy Warhol exhibit is the music of the Velvet Underground.

Though the Velvets eventually parted ways with Warhol, their music remains inexorably linked to the pop-art master, who produced their 1967 debut LP The Velvet Underground & Nico and emblazoned it with the iconic banana image that beckoned, "Peel slowly and see." Before that, he took the band on the road as part of the traveling sensory overload known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

While neither Lou Reed nor John Cale will be on hand when the Wexner Center's ballyhooed Warhol installation Other Voices, Other Rooms opens this weekend, the Wex has arranged the next best thing. Robert Forster, who teamed with the late Grant McLennan in cult favorite Aussie indie band The Go-Betweens, will play a set of Velvet Underground covers Saturday.

Forster gave his Velvets set a spin once before in Queensland, and his Columbus stop is one of only two times he'll perform the tribute Stateside. (The other, fittingly, is Sunday at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.)

What: Robert Forster plays The Velvet Underground

When: Saturday, Sept. 13

Where: Wexner Center for the Arts, Campus

Web: wexarts.org

For Saturday's show, the Wexner Performance Space will be decked out in enough hallucinogenic sights and sounds to make you think you're at Max's Kansas City. But Forster ought to snap you out of it when he busts out a few Go-Betweens songs and his solo work in addition to the VU classics.